About

About Kate Aggett SWAc, AGSA

After graduating with a BA honours degree in fashion/textiles in 1992, Kate has developed and flourished creatively, moving on from her beginnings as a knitwear and textiles designer to her current position as a collage artist.

Working from photographs, sketches and memory she creates beautiful images based on scenes from the Devon and Cornwall coastline and countryside. She has an abiding passion for colour, fabric and texture, which is key to her unique collages. Although her work could be described as mixed media, not a drop of paint or other traditional artists materials are used to create her pictures (apart from the use of a pencil and occasionally a white highlighter pen!). Instead she uses handmade papers, card, cotton, denim, silks and a whole array of other fabrics. These are all hand cut, torn, frayed, shredded and burnt to create an image executed with great dexterity and precision. Other ‘ingredients’ found within the pictures are often sourced and collected whilst out walking her dog, such as lichen, bark, leaves and feathers. These organic materials give an authentic quality to her work.

‘The excitement of finding new materials is immense. If you look closely and study a leaf or a piece of bark it becomes so many other things, a rugged cliff, tree or a ploughed field for example. The colours and textures are already there. The ordinary becomes the extraordinary’.

It is this attention to detail, innovative fusion and intricate application of the materials that make her work so unusual, exclusive and collectable.

Kate has fulfilled numerous commissions, has had work exhibited at various exhibitions and galleries throughout the southwest and has produced originals for De Montfort Fine Art’s Whitewall galleries which are nationwide. She is currently represented by Byard Art in Cambridge, The Little Picture Gallery in Mousehole, Cornwall and the Lantic Gallery in Tiverton, Devon.

She was elected as an Academician at the South West Academy of Fine and Applied Arts (SWAc) in march 2013 and became one of their Trustees for a short period in 2015. In November 2016 she was elected as a member of the Fine Art Trade Guild. In 2017 she was shortlisted for their Up and Coming Artist Award and is now an Associate of the Guild Society of Artists (AGSA).